The majority of the mod_rewrite examples you will find on the internet relate to .htaccess. I didn't want to use a .htaccess file but instead wanted to write the rules in either vhost.conf or in httpd.conf. There is a performance hit in using .htaccess on your server which is one of the reasons I didn't want to use it, also, if you don't need to use htaccess the recommendation is not to.

Although the rewrite rules in .htaccess are almost identical they didn't quite work for me in httpd.conf. I needed a series of rewrite rules to handle dynamic page content, namely to make them search engine friendly, such as turning page.php?id=2 into page-2.html

Mod_Rewrite can be complex, particularly in the use of regular expressions (regex). A regular expression is a string used to describe a pattern. They can be used for server side validation of user submitted input or for rewrite rules in Apache. If you haven't used regular expressions before their first sight might instil the same wonder as a wall filled with strange, alien hieroglyphics. Where do you even start to translate your dynamic URL into this odd language? Fortunately there is a key to the characters to help decipher a regex string or to translate your URL into a regex pattern..

When some of these characters are used in combination with each other their meaning may change

Some common Examples

Shorthand characters can also be used in pattern matching. You might be familiar with some of these from your PHP scripts. The majority of these will not be used in Mod_Rewrite I only include them for completeness and so as to refer back to them later.

The ^ and the $ are known as anchors. Anchors match a position before, after or between characters.

When you start to look at examples of using regex the terminology, metacharacters and their meanings becomes a lot easier to understand. Let's look at some simple examples first before applying what we know to Mod_Rewrite.

In testing our examples we will use PHP's function preg_match. Here we will define two variables $pattern (the pattern to test) and $match (the string we apply the pattern matching to). We pass both variables to the PHP function. The function will return 0 if there is no match and 1 if there is a match.

This will match one aphabetic character. It will fail if there is more than one character such as "sa". It will fail if the string contains a non alphabetic character. It will fail if the letter is in upper case.

This will match for a single uppercase or lowercase letter. Any other characters will fail

Using the curly braces we can define how many characters in the match. In this example any three letters will match, but the match will fail if it is only two letters or more than three.

Bu using "+" instead of the curly braces we say the match can occur one to infinite times. i.e this will match for any word or string comprised of letters.

Remember the caret ^ negates a class. In the following example only characters which are not letters will match. This includes symbols like the comma etc.

The following will match any number of aphanumeric characters

Our pattern might have different elements we want to match. Lets add extra classes. In this example Lotus and Lotus123 will match. We've made the 123 optional (note how we have gpouped it with () brackets

In the following example we introduce another character s to denote a space. As we have added ? to it, i.e. s? we are saying it is optional. This pattern would match Lotus, Lotus123 and Lotus 123

Of course if we wanted to match the word and only the word Lotus completely we would use the following. This will only match Lotus, Lotus123, Lotus 123, lotus, lotus123 and lotus 123. But of course this would also match Lotus 345

In these examples the [0-9] could equally have been written as [d] indicating a digit.

These are the basics but working through them should enable us to read and understand regular expressions, we can understand the quantifers(*, ?, +) and the anchors (^, $, \b, \w) and the other metacharacters used in regex to pattern match.

Lets now apply what we have learned to examples using Apaches mod_rewrite. At first we will just examine the pattern matching, we will then apply it to the rewrite syntax. Don't practice on your live server as, if you're unfamiliar with mod_rewrite and regex, your rules might render unexpected results.

The basic syntax for Apache mod_rewrite in httpd.conf is

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^PatternToMatch$ WhatToDo

For example the rule below will match the web page ella.html and rewrite it to mark.html

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^ella.html$ mark.html

i.e. the the URL will say ella.html but the content served up will be mark.html

The first part (^PatternToMatch$) is what a user will type in as a URL or click on to follow a link. For search engine indexing it is better if this link is a static page rather than a dynamic one. The mod_rewrite is a cloaking device. Our "bird of prey" php pages can disappear and appear as static html.

When the user clicks the link for a static html page mod_write will apply the matching rules we've given it and display the content from our dynamic php page.

Lets suppose we have a blog. The actual URL of a post might be blog.php?id=122. We might prefer a user to link to it as follows blog.php/2006/12/02/here-it-is.html

So in the URL we are looking for a specific match. Lets build it up

The more you define the greater the load on the server.

Anything between ( ) brackets in our pattern we can use as variables in our match. IN our example we have four which will be known as  $1, $2, $3 and $4. We can pass these to our match as these will be the variables needed for our PHP script to run without giving a 404 error. Our PHP script will look like this

blog.php?date=$1-$2-$3&name=$4

ReWriteBase /archive/

Command Flags

When you change a URL to directory level remember you URL's for css, javascript, images etc. need to use absolute rather than relative path or they won't be found.